 Today I'm going to be taking a look at Redcore Linux 2101 codenamed Orion. Now I've taken a look at Redcore Linux many times in the past and it's one of my favorite Gen2 based Linux distributions because it's a small distro, not too many people have heard of it. Most of you guys have probably never heard of Redcore. It's got a small development team behind it and they've been working on it for a number of years. It's been around for a little bit but this small distribution, this small development team, what I really like about their work is focus. They have a few goals that they're trying to achieve and they focus on those few goals. They're not trying to be all things to all people like so many other distributions are trying to be. All they're trying to do is make a easy to install Gen2 based Linux distribution that ships with the KDE Plasma desktop. That's all they're trying to be and for that I think they are really succeeding. So I installed Redcore yesterday. I've been playing around with it for a couple of days in a VM, the latest Redcore. And I'm going to show you guys Redcore inside this VM. I'm not going to run through the installation on camera. There's really no need. It uses the Calamaris installer, the standard graphical installer that most Linux distributions use these days. If you've seen that installer before, it works exactly the same with Redcore. The only thing I will say is that the Calamaris installer for Redcore, you know, that installation does take a while. It's a little longer installation process than in something like Manjaro or Arco Linux or something like that, where on my machine, typically I can install those in under 10 minutes with the Calamaris installer. For Redcore, it took almost half an hour for the installation to complete. So I don't know if that's just slow mirrors or if some of what it's downloading and installing needed to compile in the background. I'm not exactly sure exactly why the installation is a little slower, but just know it's a little slower. It's not terribly slow, but just know that if you get to a point where the installation, you know, the progress bar looks like it's not moving much at all. It's installing. It just, it takes it a minute before it finally gets to where it needs to go. So this is what Redcore looks like when you first log in. So this is a really nice looking desktop. I really like the wallpaper here, Redcore Orion 2101, now that I moved my head out of the way. I like the blue wallpaper. It looks like they're using the standard KDE Plasma Breeze Light theme. Now one thing in years past that kind of, I wasn't a huge fan of is Redcore because it's red in the name. Try to use red as much as possible with the theming. They're still trying to do that a little bit. I mean, we've got a red icon here on the desktop, ask for help. So the cursor arrow is blood red. But before they really did a bunch with red. I mean, the wallpapers would be black and blood red and they tried to use red and all the theming as far as the application theming and everything. And it was really kind of over the top, you know, it was so much red. It was kind of garish and overwhelming. They toned that down and I really think that's a smart decision. So being that this is a Gen 2 based Linux distribution, you know, exactly what do they ship with as far as not, you know, Plasma and the Plasma applications, but the under the hood stuff because being Gen 2 based, what a knit system are they using Gen 2 typically uses open RC, but System D is also available, you know, for you to install as part of Gen 2 as well. Are they using System D pipe wire is now a big thing. A lot of distributions are starting to experiment a little bit with pipe wire to try to get, you know, away from using pulse and jack and things like that. What audio server is installed on the system? And why don't I pull up a terminal and let's actually see what is actually going on. I wonder if Control Alt T will bring up a terminal. It does. All right. This is, of course, KDE's console. So let me zoom in here and what I could do just very quickly. Obviously, I could do where is pulse. And you can see, of course, pulse audio is going to be installed. There's several directories here of pulse libraries and configurations. But if I did a where is pipe wire, pipe wire is not to be found on the system, which I think is probably a smart thing at this point. I did read the release of notes for this particular version of Redcore 2101. And they said that they were leaving pipe wire out right now because it did tend to break things. They were having problems when they introduced pipe wire, you know, it was breaking Bluetooth especially, which I've heard from other people on other distributions complaining that pipe wire and Bluetooth sometimes it doesn't work correctly. And let's go ahead and check on system D. So if I did a system CTL status, which should show me everything that's available as far as the services available with system D, I get system CTL that command is not found. So obviously system D is not here just to verify that I'm going to do a where is system D. And there is slash lib slash system D. So there's some system D libraries here, but we should also have other system D directories if system D was really the init system. I think we should have a user share system D and Etsy system D and some other stuff. So they're obviously using open RC. If I did a where is open RC, there is yeah, all the directories for open RC. So that's the init system that we're really using. I don't know too much about open RC because it's not in a knit system that I have much familiarity with, but I know some basic commands. Like if I really wanted to get a service list of all the available services, kind of like I was trying to do with system CTL, if system D had been here, I could do something like RC dash status space dash service list all one word. And that gets me all the available services with open RC. If I knew exactly a service that I wanted to see if it was enabled or disabled, I could do RC dash service. And then I could name of service like if I wanted to check on app armor, app armor status. And that should tell me whether that's started or not. It is if I wanted to check on another one SSHD for the SSH daemon. And you can see SSH is actually not running at the moment. Now this particular release was released about 10 days ago, Gen 2 of course is a rolling release. Therefore, Redcore is a rolling release. So there probably are updates available. But let's see what kernel this did ship with about a week ago. So I'm going to do a U name, 5.11.22. And again, because this was released like nine or 10 days ago, I think at this point I'm sure there's a new kernel probably available for me. Let's actually show you guys the graphical package manager. So we have Sisyphus. Now Sisyphus is available as a command line interface package manager. You could actually open a terminal and run Sisyphus commands or you could use the Sisyphus GUI package manager. Either one though, you need sudo privileges. So when you first launch the GUI, it's going to run a sync. So it's going to sync the repositories and probably tell us what kind of updates are available for us. I'm going to let this run for a minute. It's already finished running. It says I found 2,070 packages. It didn't mention anything about an update. Maybe I manually have to upgrade the system. Let's try that. And it says please be patient. So I'll wait a minute. All right. It took about two minutes before I finally started seeing some output here in the bottom split of the Sisyphus graphical package manager here. This like a terminal output. It's just telling me what package is. It's downloading and extracting and installing. So this is updating all the packages on the system. This may take a minute. So I let that update run for a couple of minutes. I actually stepped away from the computer and then came back. And for a minute, I wasn't sure if it completed or not because there's no pop up window or anything that says update complete or anything like that. But it got to the last message here, the terminal output. And I don't see anything else going on. There's no status bar or anything at the bottom anymore. No progress bar. So I'm pretty sure it finished the upgrade. I think everything worked out just fine. Now Redcore, even though it was released like nine or 10 days ago, this version, it's not a bloated distribution by any means. There's not that much stuff installed. So the update probably didn't take very long. Now the graphical installer, just to test this out, let me pick a package that I know probably is not installed by default. Most distributions are not going to have Emacs, of course, installed. So I'm just going to quickly select Emacs here. And let me see how this actually works if I select that. And then I do install selected packages. I just want to see how the installer works. And I see how long it actually takes for it to install a package. Emacs is not a terribly big program, but it's actually not small either. It's kind of a typical program that would probably take, I don't know, 30 seconds to a minute for most package managers to download and install. But let's see what goes on here with Redcore. So I've been waiting a couple of minutes for Emacs to finish installing here. Looking at the terminal output, it is emerging some packages. So it's using the Emerge Package Manager, which is Gen2's package manager. So there's going to be some compiling going on, right? It's going to be compiling stuff. So that is why this takes a little longer rather than using a prebuilt binary distribution, things like Arch. And it looks like the installation has completed. It looks like I've got to the end of the output here. So that is the Sisyphus GUI package manager there. Now there is also another package manager because this is a KDE Plasma distribution, I believe Discover is also installed on the system. So there is KDE's package manager. And one cool thing about Discover here in Redcore, if I go to Settings, you have Flatpak. Now it is not ticked on by default, but I believe we could enable that if I wanted to, if I add FlatHub and then give it root privileges. I believe we just took care of that. Let me search for something that I know is available as a Flatpak. A lot of proprietary software often is packaged as Flatpaks these days. Popular applications like Discord, for example. So if I do a search for Discord, search in applications for Discord, there it is. So does it actually tell me if that is the Flatpak or not here in Discover? Don't use the Discover package manager or software center that much. Yes, Source is FlatHub, Flatpak. So that is the Discord Flatpak. So that is very cool that you can quickly get all your Flatpaks through the Discover software center. Now it's been relatively recent that Flatpaks now can work on a non-systemd distribution, like Gen2 with OpenRC or Redcore with OpenRC. Used to Flatpaks had a hard dependency on Systemd. You could only use them on Systemd distros. Thankfully, the Flatpak guys have since removed the Systemd dependency. Snaps also have a hard dependency with Systemd. For whatever reason, Canonical hasn't removed that dependency or figured out way around it. So you're actually not going to be able to use Snaps on Redcore. Let's look at some of the programs that are installed by default on Redcore. Let's go through the menu system just very quickly and development. We have Qt5 Designer. That's just for the Qt tool kit for those of you that want to play around with that kind of stuff. We also have Education, Mathematics, LibreOffice, Math, and Under Science. We also have LibreOffice, Math. Under Games, we have both the Lutris installer and the Steam installer. That is very cool. So if I click on Steam, it automatically adds the Steam icon to the desktop. And then if I double click that icon, that actually starts Steam. It's updating and I'm going to let this run for just a second. The installation of Steam is actually taking a couple of minutes here. So it had a lot of stuff it needed to download. I'll wait until the installation completes. All right. And the installation has completed. And now we could create a new account if we're new to Steam, or we could, of course, log in with an existing account. I'm not going to log into my Steam account. Hell, I don't even remember what my Steam username and password is. It's been so long. It's probably been more than a year since I've logged into Steam. Of course, under Games, we also had the Lutris installer. I'm not going to run through that. Under Graphics, we have Font Forge. And so that's just showing you all the fonts that are available on the system. We have GNU Image Manipulation Program. Of course, that's GIMP. GIMP is fantastic. It's the program I use to create all my thumbnails and the channel banners on YouTube and Odyssey. It's really just a fantastic program. GIMP 2.10.24. It's kind of like a free and open source alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Also, under Graphics, we have GwinView, which I believe is KDE's image viewer. Let me go to about GwinView and ImageViewer. So that's a really nice description, right? Short and to the point. So also under Graphics, we have LibreOfficeDraw and Ocular. Ocular, I believe, is our PDF viewer. So go to Ocular. Ocular, a universal document viewer. That's a fancy way of saying I can view PDFs. So under Internet, we have Conversation with a K. That is an IRC chat client. And let's see if it automatically connects us to the Redcore Support Channel. It does. Redcore on FreeNode, though. FreeNode is dead. So the people that took over FreeNode have pretty much killed it. So there's no point in trying to connect to that. But the Redcore team, I'm sure, has a lot on their plate trying to build a Linux distribution. They probably haven't had time to properly migrate over to LiberaChat, which is where everybody that was on FreeNode is kind of moving to LiberaChat on IRC. We also have Mozilla Firefox as the default browser. Mozilla Thunderbird as the default email client. Sensible choices. I know we have three entries for both Firefox and Thunderbird because we have Firefox on X11 and Firefox on Waylon. Now, Redcore uses Xorg by default. In the show notes, as far as the release notes that is, it didn't mention anything about Waylon. As far as any kind of work being done on Waylon, so I don't know if they really want people to use Waylon with Redcore, but I will play with it here in a minute. I'll log out and I'll log back in trying to use the Waylon display server. And let's see if that actually works. I'm not going to open Firefox and Thunderbird. You've seen those. Q BitTorrent is the torrent client. And of course, Steam, we added that ourselves. Multimedia, GUVCView. That is a webcam application. K3B, that is a disk burner application. So that burns CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays. And it's probably the best disk burning utility we have available as far as free and open source software. Now, most people, of course, these days don't even have disk drives as far as optical drives. So most people don't need to burn disk anymore. But if you do, K3B is definitely the program that you want to be using. MPV is our video player. Phonon is here. I don't know what Phonon is. Let me see. It looks like it is for audio settings. I don't know. I don't know what this program is. Since I don't know what these settings would do, I'm not actually going to play with them. I'm going to close that program. Under Multimedia, we also have QMMP. That is like an old school clone of Winamp. Those of you who remember Windows way back in the day with the old Winamp media player, that is what QMMP. It's kind of got that retro Winamp look. And I really like that. Actually, that is a pretty cool music player there. Also under Multimedia, we had VLC. VLC is another video player. It can also play audio though, if you want to use it in that capacity. This is VLC3.0.14 of Vettanari. Let me close that out. Under the office category, we have the library office suite. We have BaseCalcDraw, ImpressMath, and Rider, ocular again for reading PDFs. And other than that, not much else. We have some system utilities. A lot of the standard KDE system stuff is here, case, sysguard, and things like that. We have Htop installed by default. Let me open that. And let me zoom in a little bit here in console. And KDE Plasma here in this VM is using about 600 megs of the 4 gigs of RAM that I gave this VM. That's pretty light. I mean, that's for a full desktop environment. And I've actually opened a lot of stuff here in the last few minutes. I don't know what all is running in the SysTray, but 600 megs is pretty slim for a full desktop environment. That's probably half as much as what the GNOME desktop environment would be using right now. Let me close out Htop and get back into the menu system. Also under Utilities, we have ARC. That is for your archived package formats, like zip, unzip, things like that. KCalc is our calculator. KFine is for searching for files and folders on the system. And then under Utilities, we also have KWrite, which is a text editor. Nothing really special about KWrite. Speaking of text editors, let me do a Control Alt T again and zoom back in console with a K. Is VM installed? Yes. Very cool. So VM is installed. If I did a VM slash Etsy slash portage, where is the make, the use flags? Is it make.com? That's it. And there's also a make.profile directory. And let me tab again. And there is a ton of make.comp files here on Redcore. Now they do a lot of the use flags stuff for you. Those of you that are hardcore Gen2 users and love playing with the use flags, of course, you guys can probably edit these files. For most people, if you just want a Gen2 system that works, you probably don't want to go around and play in this kind of stuff here. But I'm going to, let's just open 00.useflags.com to see what one of these files looks like. And yeah, and it's just listing out use flags. So these use flags are when you're installing software, you know, how is it building these packages? What kind of flags are they building these packages with? For most desktop Linux users, you probably don't care. You just want that stuff, you know, to have a sensible set of use flags already out of the box for you. Again, you hardcore Gen2 users that are used to tinkering with the use flags. Of course, you can do that with Redcore. One thing about Redcore that I haven't mentioned yet, it is 100% Gen2 compatible. Like it's 100% Gen2 under the hood. You can use a merge for your package manager, the Sisyphus package manager that Redcore uses is actually just a wrapper around a merge. So you can use all your emerge commands. You can play with the make comp stuff. And you can do all your Gen2 stuff with Redcore. The only thing with Redcore is you've got a much quicker installation out of the box, especially if you were going to install Plasma anyway, Plasma with Firefox as a browser. You know, if you actually had to wait for all of this stuff to compile, you know, it would take hours, you know, to wait on a Gen2 system to compile where Redcore you can be up and running with KDE Plasma with a full desktop environment in about 30 minutes. Now, one final thing that I should check out, since I mentioned that we did want to test out Wayland, let's go ahead and log out of our Xorg session. Let's get back to the display manager here. And let's go into and set up Plasma X11, Plasma Wayland. And let me log in. And it looks like it logged into it just fine. We get a proper screen resolution and, you know, everything seems peppy. If I go into internet and I do Firefox on Wayland now, Firefox on Wayland looks like it works just fine. Yeah, so I would assume Wayland is appropriate. KDE Plasma supports Wayland, so that shouldn't be that big of a surprise. I just wanted to check it out. I also want to check out some of the wallpapers available on the system because wallpapers and theming, it does matter, especially for potential new users. So, you know, that's a really nice wallpaper. That abstract art, some of these are default KDE Plasma wallpapers from the past. I've seen most of these wallpapers. I actually really like that abstract art wallpaper. Now let me see if I can change the theming. So let me close this out and I'm going to go into the menu system. If I search for theme, I don't know if it will actually return anything. Global theme, I don't know. Let's see what that does. Okay, so it's using breeze. Let's change it to a dark theme because I got such a light wallpaper, it would make sense to change to a dark theme here. And let's see the icon set. I don't know. I could probably change the icon set too, but for now I think that looks a little better for me anyway. I'd probably turn off the icons on the desktop too. If I do icons, click on the desktop icons. And I'm not sure how to. I'm sure I could probably just grab these icons though, and hit the delete button and just get rid of them. I guess that works too. Anyway, that was just a quick look at Redcore Linux 2101, codenamed Orion. Really fantastic Gen2-based distribution. It doesn't get much coverage at all. I don't see like tech publications, Linux publications, online publications ever talk about Redcore. And you don't see a lot of YouTubers, especially ones that do distro reviews. Many of them don't do anything with Redcore. They don't know anything about Redcore. I think it's a woefully under-recognized Linux distribution that deserves more love. Now before I go, I need to think a few special people. I need to think the producers of this episode. I need to think. Amsy Gabe, James Mitchell, Akami Allen, Chuck David, Dylan Gregory, Erion Paul, Polytech Scott, Steven, Sven Wesson, Willie, these guys. They're my highest-tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at Redcore 2101, it would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because without these guys, I wouldn't be able to do what I do. I'm not sponsored by any corporation. I don't have corporate sponsors. It's just me and you guys, the community. If you'd like to support my work, look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace.